Yahoo!'s new chief executive Marissa Mayer is in line to receive more than
$100m (£64m) if she can turn the ailing internet company around over the
next five years.

Having quit Google on Monday and joined Yahoo! on Tuesday, the Californian company last night disclosed the pay package that helped lure the 37-year old.

She will be paid an annual salary of $1m and will be eligible for a bonus of up to $2m. Ms Mayer will also receive two annual awards of at least $6m in share options and restricted stock units beginning in November. A further $30m will be made available over the next five years. Finally, she will receive $14m largely as compensation for pay she gave up at Google, which she joined as the company's first female engineer 13 years ago.

By contrast, her predecessor, Scott Thompson, had a compensation package worth $27m, while Carol Bartz, who ran Yahoo! before Mr Thompson, was in line to make more than $40m if she had stayed. Both were dismissed early.

The potential windfall for Ms Mayer will only intensify the pressure she faces to revive a company that once dominated online search and was a leading company in Silicon Valley. Ms Mayer, who is estimated to have made $300m during her career at Google, did not face Wall Street analysts on her first day when Yahoo! reported a drop in second quarter profits. The engineer's chief challenge will be in finding ways to generate more advertising revenues from the tens of millions of people who still visit the company's homepage each day.

The news of Ms Mayer's pay came as technology giant Microsoft reported its first quarterly loss since becoming a public company in 1986. The loss of $492m was driven by a $6.2bn write-down it took on its acquisition of software maker aQuantive in 2007. The software giant had warned last month about the write-down, but investors were encouraged by the rise in revenues in the second quarter.